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Opinion: Columnists

Ron Laughery: Stop this Nablus nonsense

By Ron Laughery

Posted:
04/18/2016 07:30:30 PM MDT

Ron Laughery

Thank you, Boulder City Council, for taking the time from the serious business of running our shining city on a hill to immerse us once again in another divisive argument over an intractable problem that we can do utterly nothing to solve. In a recent guest opinion, Boulder City Councilman Sam Weaver asked us for words with "more love than anger." He was just kidding, I guess, since it's hard to imagine how importing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into City Council chambers is going to generate a whole lotta love. Anger, sure — love, probably not.

I speak, of course, of the encore City Council debate over whether we Boulderites should adopt a formal position favoring the Arabs over the Israelis in the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict.

Boy, that doesn't sound like something we would want to do, does it? But, let's at least be honest in recognizing that this is exactly what the city of Boulder is contemplating by adding another sister city in Nablus. It really is that simple.

Boulder's concept of sister cities is a good one that has resulted in six current sister cities (pop quiz for City Council members — without touching a keyboard, can you name the six Boulder sister cities, including the five that have not shipped us a teahouse for which we are eternally grateful? Hint: Portland isn't one of them). According to the Boulder city website, the purpose of our sister-city program is to build mutual respect and cooperation by allowing people worlds apart to form relationships that foster peace and prosperity.

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As a lifelong world traveler, I firmly share the belief that meeting and traveling among people around the world does build a cross-cultural appreciation and understanding that inevitably promotes peace and prosperity among nations. I count my trip to Israel and the West Bank a few years back as foremost among my travel experiences that have cemented my belief in that proposition. In the few weeks I had there, I learned that Arabs and Israelis alike were largely hard-working and good-natured people that sought a better life and loved their children, too. It also helped me understand that Arabs and Israelis often work together today to improve their lives, which gave me great hope that somehow, some way, at some time, peace will come their way.

I didn't need Boulder having a sister city in the West Bank to learn this, and neither does anyone else. If you want to promote peace and prosperity one human interaction at a time, you can just go buy a plane ticket or read a few books like "The Lemon Tree." We don't need the city of Boulder's direction nor guidance.

However, I do think that most people would agree that taking sides in a war is generally not a productive way to promote peace and understanding. If you think that liberal Boulder choosing this moment in history to sister it up with a Palestinian sweetheart is any less than taking sides, you have missed the point of this endeavor entirely.

Over the past decade, left-leaning thinkers around the world have been coming together to gang up on Israel. In a 2014 Pew poll, only 39 percent of self-defined "liberal Democrats" in the U.S. were sympathetic to Israel, reflecting an accelerating liberal trend to blame the Jews for the problems in the Mideast. To be sure, Israel's aggressive expansionist policies bear some responsibility for its problems. However, it's still hard to understand how such a substantial percentage of liberal Democrats can't find some sympathy for a nation born out of the Holocaust and then subjected to three major attacks by Arab countries and decades of terrorism targeting innocent civilians. But that's the way it is.

Anyone out there who thinks sistering up with Nablus right now is any more than a political statement with a large side of propaganda is kidding themselves. At this moment and in this town, that's exactly what we would be doing. To imagine that this is going to help either Israelis or Palestinians find peace or prosperity is ludicrous.

Only one tangible thing will come from our sisterhood with Nablus — many who care will see it as a subtle yet unmistakable expression of our town's anti-Semitism. Try that on for size and see how it feels.

Maybe someday, when peace breaks out, we can all hold hands and get more sisters in the Mideast. But, please, not now.

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